If you surveyed the video game industry just after E3 2010, you'd think stereoscopic 3D had finally reached a tipping point and was on the cusp of becoming a new gaming standard. Sony made everyone attending its E3 press conference that year wear 3D glasses to check out big-screen trailers for titles like Killzone 3 and Gran Turismo 5, Nintendo unleashed an army of booth babes at its own press conference to show off the glasses-free 3D of its Nintendo 3DS for the first time, and NVIDIA continued to push its all-in-one 3D Vision system, launched the year before.

Looking back today, it's hard to tell what all the fuss was about. While stereoscopic 3D is definitely present in today's gaming landscape, it has decidedly failed to become the revolutionary, must-have feature that seemed to warrant so much industry attention just a couple of years ago.

And industry leaders are beginning to acknowledge that fact. "I don’t think we’ll present [3D graphics] as one of the key features of our consoles but will probably stick with 3D as one of the minor elements of our consoles in the future," Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told The Independent recently in an interview about the upcoming 3DS XL.

Iwata still said stereoscopic 3D was the "natural" way humans preferred to view games, but he seemed to acknowledge that the feature's effects on consumers was becoming less pronounced. "I think when we launched the 3DS there was a kind of 3D boom, which is perhaps slightly on the wane again," he said. The novelty of the feature drove adoption for a while, but "this kind of surprise effect wears off quickly, and just [having] this 3D stereoscopic effect isn't going to keep people excited," he added.

That matches my experience with the 3DS pretty nicely. While I'll usually turn on the 3D slider briefly when reviewing a game, for the most part I leave it off, trading that sense of depth for the higher frame rate and brighter graphics of the normal 2D display. It seems I'm not alone, either—in an informal, totally unscientific poll I did of my Twitter followers, roughly half of over 40 respondents said they activated 3D on their 3DS less than 10 percent of the time, and almost a quarter said they never used the feature anymore.

Stereoscopic 3D seems to be less of a focus for Sony as well. At least year's E3, the company launched a new 3D TV aimed specifically at gamers, and continued to market its extensive 3D support as a differentiator from Microsoft's Xbox 360, which has largely ignored the feature. But this year, stereoscopic support didn't even get a cursory mention during Sony's E3 presentation.

That doesn't mean Sony has forgotten about its stereoscopic advantage in the living room... just maybe that it doesn't see it as much of a selling point any more. "I just think that it's something that's now moving into the mature phase," Sony Computer Entertainment Europe CEO Jim Ryan told CVG in an interview last month. "3D was the new thing two years ago, it's not the new thing anymore—it's just part of the bedrock of content development and publishing."

That's a view shared by those watching the evolution of stereoscopic adoption. "I'd say there was a big boom and it's starting to work its way into maturity," said Bob Dowling, one of the co-founders of the 3D Gaming and Entertainment Summits, now in their fifth years. "My sense of it is people who make games and people who play games like the concept of 3D, but I don't think it is one of those bells and whistles that make people download or buy a game because of it. It's a part of gaming, but it's not the one catalyst between a sale or not."

Dowling compared the use of stereoscopic 3D to the introduction of features like sound or color in the movie industry. At first movie viewers would watch anything with the whiz-bang new technology, but soon the features became just another way for filmmakers to tell their story. Stereoscopic 3D is now growing out of its "wow factor" days and into a boring, accepted part of the landscape.

But while sound in movies quickly became something that consumers and filmmakers found they couldn't do without, most gamers seem perfectly content with their standard, 2D display technology. While Nvidia has sold a respectable 500,000 units of its 3D Vision system through October of 2011, that leaves millions of PC gamers who would obviously rather spend their PC upgrade funds on other hardware improvements. In the living room, market analysts at NPD recently found that sales of 3D-capable sets have only inched up to around 11 percent of the total US market, and that a majority of TV shoppers don't consider 3D a crucial feature. Samsung recently admitted that demand for its 3D capable TV sets has been underwhelming, as well. I doubt they ever said the same thing when flat panel HDTVs quickly took up all the shelf space at Best Buys throughout the land.

If 3D gaming is really going to expand, it might take another leap in display technology to do it. Four in five consumers in NPD's survey said the necessity of 3D glasses were getting in the way of their purchasing a 3D TV set, but we're still a few years away from mass market sets that can display glasses-free 3D from a number of viewing angles around a living room. Dowling says the industry is working on displays capable of higher frame rates and brighter images, to overcome the problems of dimness and jerkiness that hold back most current stereoscopic options.

Or maybe it will take an advance in fashion accessories. "I think in the next two years or so you'll see some of the more fashionable eyewear people offering... 3D-capable glasses that could be used as traditional sunglasses," Dowling predicted.

Promoted Comments

I paid $1200 to get my eyes lasered back in 2000 so I would't need glasses anymore. Damned if I'm gonna pay another $1000 for a TV or game system that requires me to wear glasses.

1134 posts | registered Apr 18, 2002

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl